Fish Scales: Scale and Method in Social Science Research for North Pacific and West Coast Fishing Communities

Under the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act (MSFCMA) and other legal mandates, NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) is conducting basic social science research on fishing communities. This basic research differs from issue-driven social impact assessments in that it does not address pending policy changes or specified locations. As a consequence, NMFS’s basic social science research must cover very large geographic scales and address a broad array of analytical issues. These needs are in tension with the traditional ethnographic methods of anthropology and the MSFCMA’s focus on the community as a unit of analysis. This paper describes how anthropologists at NMFS’s Alaska Fisheries Science Center and Northwest Fisheries Science Center navigate these conflicting imperatives by adopting large-scale community profiling using social and fishing indicators informed by ethnographic site visits, and advocating a “nested-scale” analytical framework that imbricates the community le...